Tag: economy

Has US Supremacy Ended?

America has caught a whiff of a changing world. CIA Director William Burns has grudgingly acknowledged that “the United States… is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.” But America’s dogmatic inability to see past its old paradigm has prevented it from understanding that change. The United States has drifted outside the geopolitical current.

Russia, China and India insist that multipolarity is not a goal on the distant horizon but a current reality. “The trend toward multipolarity in the world is inevitable. It will only intensify. And those who do not understand this and do not follow this trend will lose,” Putin has said. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has called multipolarity “a fact, a geopolitical reality.” “The landscape,” India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar agrees “has now changed irreversibly.”

But in its inability to adapt, the U.S. clings to the battle to prevent the unipolar world’s slip back into bipolarity. The U.S. remains capable only of seeing a world divided into two blocs: it sees every nation that accepts its hegemony as one bloc and every nonaligned nation in the multipolar world that refuses to choose between two sides as the other bloc. The U.S. is incapable of seeing past the bipolar world and mistakes the multipolar reality as the other bloc in a bipolar world.

That is a misconception that prevents the U.S. from aligning itself with the inevitable new reality of the international order. Being unaligned with reality has frustrated American foreign policy.

In the outdated American model, India, the largest country in the world and a growing power, is the weight whose choice of sides will determine which block prevails. Long a partner of the U.S. and a key friend of Russia, India has a foot in both blocs of the world as the U.S. sees it. Bringing India fully into the American camp is a key to U.S. foreign policy.

But the members of the emerging multipolar world do not see the new world as one in which they have to choose sides. The U.S. continues to woo countries with gifts and to threaten countries with sanctions to seduce them into exclusive partnerships. But the outdated U.S. worldview restricts it to desperately courting countries into exclusive relationships that their worldview no longer allows them to enter into.

Keep reading

Comrade Kamala? Assessing Three of Harris’s New Economic Proposals

The Kamala Harris campaign is still relatively young. The current Vice President and previous US Senator from California has barely been in the race for a month. Her first concrete economic plans are being announced and, for the most part, panned by economists. Let’s examine some of these proposals, their effects, and why economists oppose them.

1. Price Caps on Groceries

Let’s begin with the most shocking Harris proposal—a federal ban on “price gouging” for groceries. Let’s start with the rhetoric and then get down to brass tacks. What is price gouging? It’s a term without any clear tie to economic facts.

Historically, “price gouging” referred to price increases caused by disasters (e.g., bottled water being more expensive during hurricanes). But of course, when demand increases or supply decreases, prices do naturally rise to prevent shortages. Labeling this as “gouging” in certain circumstances is arbitrary at best.

Furthermore, what sort of crisis are we appealing to in order to say there is price gouging? Covid still? Since the Covid pandemic ended over two years ago (even according to Fauci), that really doesn’t make sense. Is the crisis that inflation is making things unaffordable? Well, if the disaster behind this gouging is price increases, then all price increases are defined as gouging. That doesn’t make any sense either.

To be blunt, gouging is just a word used for emotional effect. We can always pick some arbitrary benchmark of “fair” or “unfair” price increases, but that benchmark will remain arbitrary.

Now let’s move to the brass tacks. What would this mean? The way the language is couched, this policy would amount to nothing more than a form of price control. Regardless of the particular form this ban takes, any law which penalizes a store for having prices above some point is a price control. Insofar as this policy affects prices at all, it is a price control. Insofar as it doesn’t affect prices, the policy is spurious.

What’s the problem here? Well, when either demand increases or supply decreases (or both), the competition to buy a good increases relative to the available supply. This means that more people will be bidding for the same number of products. If prices do not rise, the products will run out, and some people who are willing to pay the current price cannot purchase the good in question because it has run out. Economists call this a shortage.

If, instead, prices are allowed to rise, two things happen. First, higher prices cause buyers to decrease their consumption relative to lower prices. Second, higher prices incentivize producers to supply more of a product, since a higher price commands a higher revenue. These two forces work together to make sure that all potential buyers can purchase the number of goods they are willing to pay for.

Harris’s team claims that the pandemic was used by businesses as a pretext to trick people, to increase prices more than rising costs called for, and that this is a corrective measure. So are grocery stores pulling one over on people? Not so.

Keep reading

Extreme Gaslighting: Here Are 7 Signs That The Mainstream Media Is Flat Out Lying To Us About The Economy

How many times have you heard the mainstream media tell you that the economy is doing just great in recent months?  Personally, I have seen the word “booming” used over and over again to describe the economy, and it makes me sick.  The level of gaslighting that we are witnessing right now is off the charts.  Millions of Americans are sleeping in their vehicles, thousands of businesses are failing all over the nation, and most of the country now believes that the American Dream is no longer attainable. 

If this is what a “booming” economy feels like, I would hate to see what would happen during a “recession”.

I totally understand why the mainstream media is gaslighting us.  They want us to believe that everything is fine so that we will vote a certain way in November.  They have an agenda, and they are pushing it really hard.

But what they are telling us simply does not match up with reality.

The following are 7 signs that the mainstream media is flat out lying to us about the economy…

Keep reading

Democrat “economist” appears on CNBC and claims Trump caused 8 trillion bucks of the 35 trillion bucks in national debt – BIG FAT LIAR!!!!! 2 trillion bucks out -ignores C19 and debt interest entirely

Bharat Ramamurt thinks that the US government is not raising enough money in taxes and is especially targeting 60,000 Americans earning more than 1 million bucks a year with a 24% capital gains tax. You know how socialists hate anyone with money or who earns it. I wonder if he knows how many of these are Democratic Party donors?

He also states that discretionary spending, excluding defence, is at a very low level of 16% and uses this as an argument for tax increases. He claims that plans to increase taxes will not impact 100 million Americans – so presumably it will impact 240 million other Americans.

One big fat lie he brazenly told was that under Trump, 8 trillion of the US’ 35 trillion national debt was raised during Trump’s term. So, let’s fact check that.

Keep reading

This Is Not Capitalism

The word capitalism has no stable definition and should probably be permanently retired. That won’t happen, however, because too many people are invested in its use and abuse. 

I’m long over trying to push my definition over someone else’s understanding, generally viewing disputes about vocabulary and dictionary definitions as a distraction against the real debate over concepts and ideals. 

The point of what follows is not to define precisely what capitalism is (my friend CJ Hopkins is hardly alone in describing it as once emancipatory but now rapacious) but rather to highlight the many ways in which economic systems of the industrialized world have made a hard turn against the whole ethos of voluntarism in the commercial sector. 

Still, let’s pretend we can agree on a stable description of a capitalist economy. Let’s call it the system of voluntary and contractual exchange of otherwise contestable and privately owned property titles that permits capital accumulation, eschews top-down planning, and defers to social processes over state planning.

It is, ideally, the economic system of a society of consent. 

This is obviously an ideal type. So described, it is inseparable from freedom as such and forbids state planning, expropriation, and legal privileges for some over others. How does the status quo match up against that? In uncountable ways, our economic systems utterly fail the test, with all the results that one would expect. 

What follows is a short list of all the ways in which the US system does not comport with some ideal type of capitalistic marketplace. 

Keep reading

Kamala Harris’s Inflation Reduction Act: A Costly Flop That Fails Middle-Class Americans

The Inflation Reduction Act’s Promises

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, championed by Democrats, promised to fix our economy with incentives like a 30% tax credit for energy-efficient appliances, solar panels, and windows. But these solutions come with sky-high upfront costs that average American families can’t afford.

Instead of addressing inflation, this bill benefits the wealthy, who can use these credits, while ordinary households face tighter budgets. Rather than easing financial pressure, this legislation represents costly government overreach that fails to deliver real relief.

The Reality of Inflation and Economic Impact

Despite the Inflation Reduction Act’s promises, inflation has remained a significant issue. In July 2023, consumer prices increased by 3.2% compared to July 2022. Although inflation showed signs of slowing down, with a 2.9% increase from July 2023, the rate remains below its peak of 9.1% from June 2022. Overall, it’s clear the Act hasn’t quite done the job it was supposed to.

Kamala Harris has played a key role in advocating for the Inflation Reduction Act, promising that the legislation would combat rising inflation and ease financial burdens on American families. Despite these assurances, the Act has not delivered the expected results.

Keep reading

Dems Scramble To Walk Back Harris’ Price Control Scheme

Democrats are in damage control mode after Kamala Harris’ communist price control scheme received a harsh rebuke – including from the Washington Post, which characterized it as “populist gimmicks.“

Facing pressure to defend the plan, Democratic lawmakers are downplaying it as a pipe dream that has no chance of passing Congress, Politico reports.

The plan, unveiled as part of Harris’ first big economic policy speech, has become a focal talking point for Donald Trump and allies, who continue to frame it as “communist price controls.” Meanwhile, food industry officials and some left-of-center economists have warned that price controls could be detrimental, according to the report.

Central to the plan is a call for congress to pass the first-ever federal price gouging ban on food and grocery stores – mirroring legislation reintroduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) earlier this year, for which Warren was taken to task by CNBC‘s Joe Kernen.

Now, six Congressional Democrats and five Democratic aides tell Politico that they’ve been privately telling critics that the plan isn’t viable – and is instead a messaging tactic to to divert blame over inflation from the Biden-Harris administration.

Even many Democrats remain skeptical, or at least uncertain about how Harris would carry out her proposal, if elected. They’re still working on getting details, but many have left that for after the DNC. -Politico

“It’s clear to me these are very general, very lofty goals,” said one of the Democratic lawmakers.

“I honestly still don’t know how this would work,” said a second Democratic lawmaker.

Keep reading

It Hasn’t Worked Once, So Why Would A Politician Go All-In On Price Controls Now?

August 15th was the anniversary of the infamous “Nixon Shock”, when excessive spending and trade deficits had governments on the ropes, as prices climbed relentlessly, inflation soared into the double digits, while economic growth stalled.

In 1971 of that year, Nixon “temporarily” suspended convertibility of the US dollar for gold (still in effect), while simultaneously proclaiming a 90-day freeze on all wages and prices across the United States.

The stagflationary ’70s also saw Trudeau the 1st enact “The Anti-Inflation Act of 1975”, with his infamous “6 and 5” measures (a 6% cap on wage increases with a 5% cap on prices was supposed to put 1% back into the pocket of the peasants).

None of this worked, and as the lumpenpublic were mulched by higher prices and growing government, gold served as a barometer to it all – soaring from $35/oz at the time of the Nixon Shock to $850/oz in 1980 (that all-time high still won’t be exceeded in inflation adjusted terms until gold cracks about $2,580).

It took Paul Volcker  to get inflation under control with double-digit interest rates – (when the news came that he had been elevated from President of the New York Fed under Gerald Ford to Chairman by Jimmy Carter, Volcker’s wife burst into tears).

Today, 50 years later with a monetary regime that makes the ’70s look austere, double-digit interest rates are simply not an option – we’ve just seen a 5-sigma event nearly blow up the global monetary system from the BoJ nudging interest rates from the zero bound to 25bps.

With an unprecedented levels of monetary expansion and debt levels somewhere beyond nosebleed elevations, policy-makers and central bankers are trapped.

This is why we’re seeing a resurgence in popular rhetoric around the idea of price controls – everywhere from Jagmeet Singh here in Canada, who blames grocery store CEOs for inflation, to Dem nominee and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris, channeling him with promises of food price controls as part of her election campaign.

Keep reading

Harris’s Price Control Plan is Worse Than You Think

The Myth of the Eternal Return is the title of a 1954 tome by the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, although many other deep thinkers, from Pythagoras to Nietszche, have voyaged into the same poetic and philosophic recesses. 

My task is much shallower: To show how old, bad, ideas keep recurring in American politics. Yes, I bear witness to The Truth of Infernal Return. As with bad pennies and bad breath, it’s no myth that our politics are infested with nefarious ideas that never die and eternal lie. As with some Lovecraftian daemon, they await their infernal comeback. 

Case in point: Kamala Harris’s August 16 announcement of her plan for price controls—that being a fair way to describe federal monitoring of “price gouging.” Harris has revived one of the worst ideas from the stagflationary (stagnation + inflation) 1970s. More on that later, but let’s recall other bad ideas that have lamentably rebounded: 

First, unnecessary foreign war. Into this Baby Boomer, memories of the bloody futility of the Vietnam War are seared. So when the North Vietnamese finally conquered South Vietnam in 1975, my teenage self said, “Well, at least the U.S. will never make that mistake again.” Which only proves I had a lot to learn. As we all know, less than three decades later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, a military operation that made the Vietnam War look prudential. 

Today, 21 years after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished”—the most grimly hilarious pronunciamento since Vietnam’s “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”—we still have troops in Iraq, which is now dominated, of course, by Iran. So what, now, are those Americans doing there? They aren’t looking for WMDs, and they aren’t building democracy. Instead, they are fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS, Daesh—or whatever new bogeyman emerges from the Middle East’s tireless terror-meme generator. 

According to reports, the U.S. has 3,400 troops in Iraq and adjacent Syria, but only a fool would vouch for the accuracy of that number, given officialdom’s history of fibbing, the slippery X-factor of contractors—and perhaps some other number-hiding shell-game that we’ll learn about only in the next investigative scoop. 

Keep reading

Kamala Harris’s updated truly lousy jobs report and stock market hysteria, today

Really, we just need to alert readers to this “development” (not really) yesterday and overnight, from Bloomberg:

Fed Confronts Up to a Million US Jobs Vanishing in Revision

US job growth in the year through March was likely far less robust than initially estimated, which risks fueling concerns that the Federal Reserve is falling further behind the curve to lower interest rates. 

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. economists expect the government’s preliminary benchmark revisions on Wednesday to show payrolls growth in the year through March was at least 600,000 weaker than currently estimated — about 50,000 a month.

So that’s Bloomberg this morning. We’d like to know which “economists” are downplaying the Biden-Harris feints from labor on what our jobs are doing, and where they are going.

We already know that any “gains” in jobs, for years now, has been because of part-time hires, federal hires, and illegal migrant hires. The Labor Department is not forthcoming on these realities, either.

The Business Times offers this analysis vis-à-vis implications for any change in interest rates precipitated by a more honest picture:

US JOB growth in the year through March was likely far less robust than initially estimated, which risks fueling concerns that the Federal Reserve is falling further behind the curve to lower interest rates.

Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo economists expect the government’s preliminary benchmark revisions on Wednesday (Aug 21) to show payrolls growth in the year through March was at least 600,000 weaker than currently estimated – about 50,000 a month.

While JPMorgan Chase forecasters see a decline of about 360,000, Goldman Sachs indicates it could be as large as a million.

Have our federal information minders dropped the ball, or has Kamala forgotten to take care of her fraudulent economic/finance picture? Here’s more:

‘A large negative revision would indicate that the strength of hiring was already fading before this past April,’ Wells Fargo economists Sarah House and Aubrey Woessner said in a note last week. That would make ‘risks to the full employment side of the Fed’s dual mandate more salient amid widespread softening in other labor market data.’

However, Kamala may not need to overly worry, as we won’t have anything close to the truth until after the election:

The government’s preliminary benchmark projection will be followed by final revisions that are incorporated into the January employment report to be released in February.

That’s February 2025, folks. If Trump is in by then, he’ll be fixing it. If Kamala’s the man, she won’t notice it anyway.

Keep reading